Alrighty! Starting with your organic intersections, these are for the most part coming along reasonably well - with the second page being a fair bit better than the first, suggesting that you were warming up nicely. One thing I do want to suggest however is that with this exercise, you always build upwards. You may feel that after the fact the base level of your pile doesn't have enough going on - don't worry about it. Since we have to consider the nature of the forms beneath the one we're adding when drawing its silhouette, if we were to add another form (like the more ball-like form on the far right of the second page) and then try and get one of the others to somehow sit on top of it, its silhouette was drawn without this other form present. So the result would not be convincing. Long story short - don't try and put a new form "underneath" an old one.

Moving onto your animal constructions, there's a lot of good stuff here, although there are definitely things we can work on to keep making progress.

Starting with your birds, I really loved your eagle and I felt this was an excellent example of construction employed well. Your drawings as a whole show a lot of thought being put towards how every element you add is three dimensional and solid, but it comes together especially well with this eagle, especially around its head. My only complaint is a very small one - if you draw part of something, draw it all. In this case, the wing on the other side of the body was cut off where it is overlapped by another - since our drawings here are all spatial reasoning exercises, our focus is on understanding how each part relates to its neighbours, and therefore each form must be drawn in its entirety, if it is to be drawn at all.

Moving on, one of the issues you remarked upon was with your leg constructions. On this front, I did notice a number of issues - or at least inconsistencies - which I had actually remarked upon in regards to your lesson 4 submission. It is clear that you made an effort to applying the sausage method to construction your legs in some of these, though you were not at all consistent in doing so, and you also did not actually apply the steps and principles of the technique as thoroughly as you were meant to:

• First and foremost, there were plenty of cases where you didn't use the technique - tiger 2, the bears, the elephant, etc. As I explained in lesson 4, "The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat.

• Once the sausage chains are in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms." Again, I provided some examples of this in my lesson 4 critique: wrapping forms around sausages, common pitfalls when trying to add additional components to 3D structures, building up an ant's leg, building up a dog's leg. Based on how you approached things here, I get the impression you forgot about the information that was provided there in the last critique, at least in regards to this. In regards to this, I wanted to point out the fact that with your gorilla drawing, specifically its forearm, you drew the sausage structure but then went on to basically redraw its silhouette to account for the larger space. Modifications to silhouettes of forms occur in 2D space, because the silhouettes themselves are a 2D representation of the form. To actually make this change in 3D, one must actually introduce a new 3D form, and define its relationship with the structure that already exists (as shown in the diagrams above).

• When you did use the sausage method, there were some cases where you were pretty loose in terms of the use of actual 'sausage' forms. As shown in this diagram, it is important that you stick to simple sausage forms (this is also stressed back in lesson 2's organic forms with contour lines exercise). In many places you have a tendency to use ellipses rather than sausages, as pointed out in the bottom left of the diagram.

In regards to the intersection lines between the sausages, your work here isn't too bad, but there are two things to keep in mind:

• The contour lines themselves are sometimes shallow in their curvature, and don't capture the impression that they're wrapping around the form. You can see this issue addressed here. Making a point of overshooting those curves and hooking them back around (as mentioned in the notes I just linked) will help you overcome that.

• How you draw those contour lines is one of the things that is not really found in the reference image. You use the reference image to determine the orientation of the forms themselves in space, but you then go on to apply your spatial reasoning skills to decide what degree the curve should be drawn with. Since this contour line basically designates a cross-sectional slice of both forms simultaneously, you need to consider how that slice is oriented relative to the viewer. If we we're looking at the animal from the side, then it's likely going to be quite narrow in its degree (as you've generally done). If we were looking from a higher angle, however, where we'd ostensibly be able to see the "face" of this slice (if the rest of the body weren't in the way), then the degree would be wider.

The next thing I wanted to touch upon - although this critique is already getting quite long - has to do with the use of additional forms. There are definitely places where you're using them well, and stressing the importance of "wrapping" those forms around the underlying structure, but these notes should help you think about how those forms can be integrated with one another, how we might have multiple additional forms pile upon one another, and where we should focus on giving those forms more complexity, and where they should have simpler curves.

I know you mentioned you were worried about your head constructions, but for the most part I'm pretty happy with these. That said, I did put down some notes on this bear drawing - mostly about ways you can define the other solid structures around the eye socket, like the brow ridge, the cheeks, and so on. You can also see this shown in this moose head demo.

I did point out that in this drawing in particular, it was quite small, not quite taking full advantage of the space available to you on the page, but in most cases you do appear to be drawing quite a bit larger, which is good. Just keep in mind that the more space you have, the more you'll be able to engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills. This will help with some of the smaller things like wrapping eyelids around eyeballs.

There's one last thing I wanted to address - this is a bit more present in some of your later drawings (like the elephants, mostly). Here your drawings end up splitting into two components. You've got the underlying construction, and then you redraw the entire creature on top with darker, richer lines, separating it into an 'underdrawing' and a 'clean-up pass'. This is something I want you to avoid moving forward - line weight is not intended to replace existing marks, but rather to emphasize them only, clarifying specific overlaps. Line weight goes on specific local sections of existing lines, and if you find yourself trying to add weight to the full length of a given mark, you're probably falling back into this approach.

That approach tends to promote the mentality that we're creating a "final drawing" - that we focus on decorating it, rather than focusing on our goal of visual communication. This comes out in your approach to texture in certain parts of the elephants as well, specifically the deeper furroughs in its skin. There you've somewhat forgotten the principles from Lesson 2, specifically those of implicit textural drawing techniques.

The thing to keep in mind is that everything we do in these drawings is focused on one goal - conveying information to the viewer. Through construction we give them the information they need to understand how they could manipulate the object in their hands. Through texture however, we convey what the viewer needs to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over its various surfaces. In order to achieve this, we're still focusing on specifically conveying 3D forms. Where you drew the lines on the elephant's skin, what we really want to be doing is implying the chunks of skin. Every mark drawn should be understood as a shadow being cast by some form preset in your object.

Anyway! This has definitely gotten very long, so I'm going to leave it there. I'll ask you to do a few additional pages of animal drawings below - you're definitely doing well overall, but I want to see more purposeful use of the sausage method when constructing your animals' legs.